The manual search works fine and I find the correct driver directly for my GeForce 6600:

The automatic uses an ActiveX control to scan your machine and locates your NVIDIA graphics driver. On my laptop which has NVIDIA GeForce Go 7400, there is no driver found (can't find it through the manual search either). This is probably due to that driver is release through the DELL support, but it would have been nice to have some information on that no suiting driver was found instead of an empty page.

But now the technology news has been down for days, it has happened in the past that it has been down for a day or so, but now I have not been able to read the news on Tailrank since monday. No news? Don't think so!

Apart from the actual change of colors and layout the new tabbed interface is the biggest user interface change. Navigation is far much better with this and with the breadcrumbs.

The search is the most improved feature, now with auto-complete and more indexed content.

The MSDN library tree seems to be much faster, really nice for users (like me) who uses the online help instead of the full DVD install of MSDN library (I always forget to update it when a new DVD arrives). But it is still reloading the whole page and tree for every click in the content on the right!

I think it's a great update to MSDN, although I have some troubles connecting to it right now...

The success of XPS, vs PDF and others, are really depending on the number of supported devices, operating systems and tools. Right now the XPS support is limitied in applications outside the Microsoft Windows sphere, but there are plans for other operating systems. (Maybe Silverlight will boost this with the CoreCLR).

XPS Essentials Pack

NiXPS

NiXPS is an interesting software company, with a product with the same name that is used for changing and checking XPS files. NiXPS v1.0 is currently in beta and is available for Windows 2000/XP/Vista as well as for MacOS 10. This product is not for viewing XPS files, instead NiXPS is currently developing a shared C/C++ XPS library - so any creative developers out there: here is your chance to create some nice XPS viewers. Follow the development at their blog.

Open Xml Package Explorer

Not really an XPS tool but Package Explorer is a nice Office Open Xml application created by Wouter van Vugt. It is created for Office Open Xml documents but since XPS files are built on OPC, which Package Explorer supports, Package Explorer might be extended to support XPS files in the future. Package Explorer is available at CodePlex. Maybe if I get time and Wouter allows it I'll have a look at it :-)

The current version only supports viewing of Office 2007 documents as of today, but if you purchase the application you will get free upgrades and the coming versions will support creation and editing of Office 2007 documents.

The upgrade to Windows Mobile 6 does not support the Office Open XML format which I originally hoped for but now DocumentsToGo has come to rescue...

To get you started with creating XPS documents with the .NET 3.0 Framework you should read the January 2006 article in the MSDN Magazine by Bob Watson which explains it all. It contains everything you need to know from reading to writing to signing XPS documents.

XPS and XAML

With XAML, Extensible Application Markup Language, you can create nice interfaces and documents using either an XML editor or Microsoft Expression Blend or Design which can export documents to XAML. The .NET 3.0 Framework contains built-in functionality to convert from XAML to XPS which means that if you are building XAML applications you can easily make print functionality into it.

Since XPS is a fixed page format and WPF applications use a flow document style you have to convert your application interface into pages. Luckily the flow documents contains a paginator interface which divides your flow document into pages. Feng Yuan, XPS guru, shows you how to do this and even include margins, headers and footers in a blog post.

Summary

Not much code in this post, there are already enough, but with the links provided above you should get started pretty easy.

I really hope that more applications will get a Save as XPS function, and let's hope that Adobe don't go crazy and summons every developer implementing this.

Next post int this series will look at some good XPS utilities for editing, browsing and manipulating XPS files.

SoloSEO Review: SoloSEO, is an easy web application containing a set of tools to manage your search engine optimization, SEO. I decided to give it a try to measure how my site is seen by the search engines and how well it performed.

When starting with SoloSEO you will get a dashboard containing a checklist with tasks which you should complete to gain full benefit of the service. The tasks helps you getting started with the tools and let's you get aquainted with the application. The dashboard also contains a summary of your completed tasks, links to the different tools as well as statistics for your site.

One of the first things you should do is provide your sitemap so SoloSEO so it can import your site. You can import up to 200 pages and keep track of them. SoloSEO chooses the top 200 from your sitemap. I would have preferred that the top 200 pages with the highest sitemap priority was selected by default.

Once you have imported your pages you can easily see all backlinks to your pages, the PageRank of the page and some other statistics.

The Links tool will help you creating inbound links to your site or which pages to ping with a trackback on your blog, so you will get a higher PageRank etc. The tool gives you a set of predefined searches in Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask! to start looking for a potential target.

The Keywords tool allows you to either manually find or scan your site for keywords and thenf ine tune them.

SoloSEO have several more tools for you to use and once you have started optimizing your site you can't sit down, you have to continue to improve it - and to help you SoloSEO has a number of different reports that can be run and sent to you by e-mail so you can keep track of your rankings and competitors.

Over all I like SoloSEO and I hope that my site will climb higher up in the search results after my two week trial. There are some minor design issues and JavaScript errors when I run it in Internet Explorer 7 but I have reported them and hopefully they will be resolved in a near future.

I initially had some trouble installing Microsoft Silverlight on Windows Vista. It all installed perfectly without any warnings (not during setup nor in the Windows logs), but I could not get the Silverlight 1.0 beta applications to run. I guess that it had something to do with having installed WPF/E betas installed.

To get it to work this is what I did...

1: Start a command prompt using elvated privilegies

Click the Start button, enter "command", right click Command Prompt and select Run as administrator and the click Continue in the User Account Control dialog.

Joost has delivered unlimited invites to all the beta testers and I thought I share a few of them. Since I can't invite people all day long then the first ten to comment on this post will recieve an invitation.

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About Wictor...

Wictor Wilén is a Director and SharePoint Architect working at Connecta AB. Wictor has achieved the Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) - SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) - SharePoint and Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) - SharePoint 2010 certifications. He has also been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for four consecutive years.

These postings are provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights. The
content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's
view in anyway. In addition, my thoughts and opinions open to change. Therefore
you should not consider past posts to necessarily reflect my current thoughts and
opinions.